Mobile Legal Aid Office To Help Homeless Youth

HARTFORD — A new legal aid office on wheels will hit the road this month and begin reaching scores of youngsters who are homeless or in danger of landing in the streets, advocates said.

"Most of the youths who are moving around and experiencing some level of homelessness don't know they have legal rights," said Stacey Violante Cote, a lawyer who directs the Teen Legal Advocacy Project for the Center for Children's Advocacy in Hartford.

"This new endeavor of ours is to literally use a vehicle to reach out to this population."

The center's new van, which features an office space with a generator and electrical outlet, will be unique in the state when it launches on Wednesday, Cote said. The mobile legal aid clinic is being piloted in Hartford and is aiming to help about 200 teenagers and young adults a year with their basic needs, such as education and health, and more complex matters through consultations, direct representation and legal rights training.

The roving office will especially target "unaccompanied" high school-aged youth who are on their own and may not consider themselves homeless, advocates said, because many resort to "couch surfing" with friends, relatives or anyone else who will take them in for the night.

The project is believed to be the second of its kind in the country, said Martha Stone, executive director of the Center for Children's Advocacy, which secured about $50,000 worth of grants and donations to buy the van and get it retrofitted. The first such mobile legal clinic focused on youth homelessness is in Chicago, she said.

"It's bringing legal services to where the kids are," Stone said, "because the kids aren't going to come to us."

A grant from the Herbert and Nell Singer Foundation funded the van, Cote said, and the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, along with other groups, are supporting the project with staff time and other resources.

The plan is to bring the Nissan NV to sites around Hartford, from city school parking lots to organizations such as Our Piece of the Pie. That social services agency on Sargeant Street has agreed to make referrals and receive staff training on the legal rights of homeless youth, who have limited shelter options in Connecticut, Cote said.

The teens may have left foster care, escaped abuse or strife in their home, or gotten kicked out for coming out as gay, advocates said.

Whatever the reason, about 70 to 100 young clients with unstable housing receive services from Our Piece of the Piece, said Hector Rivera, the organization's chief operating officer. "A lot of these young people don't know that they're actually homeless, or don't think of themselves that way."

The mobile legal clinic "will start to facilitate some self-advocacy on behalf of the young people," Rivera said. "Information is so powerful if provided in the right way."

Marta Bentham, the city school system's family services director, said she has already compiled a list of about 120 students whom she plans to refer to the legal aid van.

Hartford public schools have identified 328 families with children, or 456 students, who live in shelters, motels or are temporarily "doubled up" in other people's homes, she said. Those students get bus passes, book bags, school uniforms and other aid through the district's "Families and Youth In Transition" program, which also tracks their attendance and academic services.

Bentham said the van can be an unintimidating place for them to learn about their medical and educational rights, and to gain encouragement. Taped to a wall in her office is a copy of a 2014 Hartford Public High School diploma from a homeless student who believed he wouldn't be able to graduate.

"The trust factor with these kids is the first thing," Bentham said. "In their eyes, everybody has failed them. So this van is the vehicle ... for these young people to, in fact, find their way home."

The Center for Children's Advocacy plans to post the van's locations on social media and on its youth website, SpeakUpTeens.org, to make it easier on those who have trouble staying in touch, Cote said. Some clients may have only a dwindling number of pre-paid minutes on their cellphones.

"This gives them a little bit of control knowing they can reach us," she said.